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probably never be settled conclusively. I am substantially in agreement with Alexan-
der Nehamas (1985: 142-149), that a scrupulous interpretation of the evidence sug-
gests that, fundamentally, Nietzsche's dictum does not have a cosmological or ‘physi-
cal’ meaning, but rather an ethical or existential one. On reflection, however, I believe
that what appears to be a formulation on Nietzsche's part, which bears primarily on the
successive physical ‘states’ of the cosmos, may indeed be shown to have an ethical or
existential meaning as well, with important implications for the notion of ‘immortality’
put forward here.3 The following formulation from The will to power (1067; 1968:
549) is a case in point:
If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a
certain definite number of centers of force - and every other representation re-
mains indefinite and therefore useless - it follows that, in the great dice game
of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infi-
nite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be real-
ized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between
every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations
would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire
sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely
identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has
already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum.
Judging by face value, this passage may seem to resist ethical-existential interpreta-
tion. And yet, if minimal agreement could be reached that the ‘quantity of force’ that
comprises the world includes - as I believe it undeniably must - embodied, in the
broadest sense ‘energy-driven’ individuals, it follows that the ‘calculable number of
combinations’ of all the constituents of Nietzsche's ‘world’ would bear on the specific
configuration and sequence of actions (including moral or ethical actions) performed
by these individuals. Even if one grants that such actions, insofar as they are ethical,
are not strictly motivated by physical antecedents as ‘causes’, but by ethical choices or
decisions, they would still - as actions performed in time - ineluctably comprise con-
stituents indispensable for the temporal sequence or series of states and events to be
the totality that Nietzsche envisages it to be. And if this means, as I believe it does,
that every such action would be singular or unique in relation to all the other constitu-
ent conditions of the totality, and that, due to its putative infinite repetition, it would
have to be re-instantiated, over and over, in the course of infinite time, such actions -
or, more appositely - the individual agents performing these - may be said to attain a
certain ‘immortality’.
It may be objected that ‘immortality’ in this sense is trivial compared to the ‘immor-
tality’ attributed to specific individuals (under very specific circumstances of agency)
by Blumenberg and Lefort, as Copjec has argued, because it seems to apply trivially to
every human being who has ever lived (on the supposition that ethical or moral deci-
sions and actions are coterminous with being human). Indeed, I would agree. But at
least this much can already be established: human actions of an ethical kind are insep-
arable from the kind of actions that Nietzsche subsumes under the ‘calculable number
3 On a previous occasion I put forward such an ethical interpretation of the ‘eternal recurrence’ (Olivier
1994); here I would like to refine it and relate it to the notion of ‘immortality’ in the modern age as
thematized by Copjec.